Related Articles

While the land acquisition process for the upcoming Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) is still in the works, the City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO) on Wednesday floated a global tender for the Rs 9,500-crore project.

The tender invites applicants to pre-qualify them for the bidding stage, Maharastra's chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said, while announcing the nodal agency's move to float the request for qualification (RFQ).

"We will complete the land acquisition process and tender process simultaneously," Chavan said, responding to a query on whether the tendering was done in any hurry. The project, spread over 1,160 hectares, still has 247 hectares left to be acquired that is being negotiated between the government and the project affected people (PAPS) from five villages. They are yet to accept the government's compensation.

Sanjay Bhatia, vice chairman and managing director, CIDCO, said, "We will complete the land acquisition process before the request for proposal stage (RFP)." This would be after June, the deadline for the closure of the RFQ.

CIDCO's RFQ states that the estimated total project cost for the development of phase 1 and 2 of NMIA will be Rs 9,500 crore. The cost of pre-development work is estimated at Rs 2,358 crore, which includes Rs 1,538 crore of land development for airport and Rs 800 crore for other works.

The airport will eventually have a passenger handling capacity of 60 million annually. After the completion of the first phase, the airport will have the capacity to handle 10 million passengers. The bidding process is slated to be a two-staged process, which will be taken up through public-private partnership (PPP) on design, build, finance, operate and transfer (DBFOT) basis. The first stage will involve qualifications of interested parties/consortia who make an application in accordance to the provisions of RFQ, following which CIDCO shall announce a list of pre-qualified applicants who will be eligible for the bidding process.

According to CIDCO, the bids will be invited on the basis of the offer to pay a premium in the form of percentage share of annual gross revenue payable to the authority over the tenure of the concession.